A Short Life of Kierkegaard
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A Short Life of Kierkegaard is a book by Walter Lowrie, the first edition was published in 1938 by Oxford University Press simply under the title Kierkegaard. The book was influential for being the first English biography which covers both wider and lesser known areas of Søren Kierkegaard's life, philosophy, and theology. Lowrie was commissioned by the editor of Oxford University Press Charles Williams to write the biography and to translate into English for the first time several of Kierkegaard's seminal works in full, including Either/Or and Philosophical Fragments.
Literary reception
Some of the book's biographical and philosophical details, despite the best available information at the time, are now known to be false, yet Lowrie's examination is sympathetic, as indeed are his translations of Kierkegaard. The reviews of the book enthused about Kierkegaard as a proponent of the individual's worth in the midst of alienation intrinsic to 20th century mass society.